Is Eudaimonism Fundamental, or Is It Just False?

So a few days backI harshed on Edward Tverdek for his
justification of statist liberalism by prioritizing the needs of social groups
over those of the people who compose them.

But coming up with good, solid philosophical justifications for your
instinctive political hunches is notoriously difficult.

The other day I stumbled on Will Wilkinson’s “Eudaimonism is False,” which he
wrote in response to a couple of libertarian sorts who were trying to figure
out what the best philosophical grounding for their political instincts might
be:

Kevin Vallier argues,
correctly in my view, that “Utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive and
self-ownership is too consequence-insensitive.” Contractualism, he suggests,
offers a third way that gets it just right in the
consequence-sensitivity department.

Roderick Long replies by offering an alternative third way:
an interesting version of eudaimonism
that includes a not-overly consequence-insensitive version of the
self-ownership thesis.
Vallier responds
by embracing eudaimonism himself, while countering that “the content of the
virtue of justice is best specified by a contractualist
principle rather than the self-ownership principle.”

Roderick Long makes the case that the various virtues that Aristotle mostly
treated independently from each other are actually mutually dependent, and to
some extent justify each other:

For example (to simplify somewhat), if courage is the virtue of responding
appropriately to danger, and generosity is the virtue of responding
appropriately to others’ needs, then when meeting other people’s needs is
dangerous, there is no way to define what course of action generosity
requires independently of defining what course of action courage requires,
and vice versa. The final contents of the virtues are thus constructed out of
their prima facie contents, subject to the constraint of
mutual determination.

In Long’s framework, the virtues sort of pull each other up by each others’
bootstraps into a mutually-justificatory foundation that leans both on
consequentialism and deontology in a satisfying way.

Interesting. Wilkinson, though, goes for the jugular by noting that an
important foundation for Aristotle’s remarkable and interesting ethics is a
theory of human nature that nobody takes seriously anymore. Aristotle believed
that everything had a purpose, and that you could discern its purpose by
figuring out what it was uniquely designed to do, and that something was
“good” to the extent that it fulfilled this purpose well. He then determined
that human beings were uniquely designed for intellectual contemplation, and
so we were most flourishing — most eudaimon — when we were
philosophizing well.

But now we understand more about the origin of species than Aristotle did,
and we know that individual species are not uniquely designed to do
anything, but are all designed to compete well in the contest of
natural selection, and can only be said to be uniquely designed to
fit some environmental niche or other.

But while Aristotle’s idea of man’s purpose was suspiciously like Aristotle’s
idea of a good time; Darwin’s insight into man’s purpose is disappointingly
banal and doesn’t seem very helpful as a guide. As Wilkinson puts it: “Making
copies of your genome is, in an important sense, what you are for.
But it has next to nothing to do what what you ought to try to do
with yourself.”

He concludes, then, that contra Aristotle, “there is no
non-stupid natural fact of the matter about what it would mean for
you to realize or fulfill your potential, or to function most excellently as
the kind of thing you are.”

This is what attracts me to the existentialists, I think. They came to the
same conclusion that
you cannot
discover the meaning of life in human nature, and most of them also
believed the supernatural was no help either. The ethical programs they
wrestled with hinted at a number of other approaches, but focused on the
reminder that we (must) create our own values in order to decide how to live.

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